Tuesday Roundup: News, Thy Name Is MySpace

More has come out this morning about the TYC case, and the following story contains some tales about the hiring protocols and standards employed by the TYC, or perhaps the lack thereof. This is one of the more bizarre headlines to come out of the TYC abuse debacle: one of the TYC officials being investigated has a MySpace page which the Austin American-Statesman's Mike Ward was intrepid enough to dig up. If you're of a certain age or generation, you probably have a MySpace page, but I don't know many 41-year-olds that have them.

The death-penalty-for-child-molesters bill known as Jessica's Law has been debated and hemmed and hawed about for a couple of weeks now, and yesterday it hit the floor of the House. The version that eventually passed was a compromise -- lawmakers created a new felony called 'continuous abuse of a child,' described as more than one incident within a 30 day span. It carries a mandatory 25 year sentence for a first offense, and the second offense is a capital crime. Last week, questions on the constitutionality of the bill caused it to be delayed.

Some Democrats still expressed concern over the possibility that the bill might turn a child molester into a murderer since the penalties for both will potentially end up being the same. It passed the House easily, though, 118-23. The Senate version dials up the mandatory sentence for a first-time child molestation conviction to 25 years. There will be some haggling over that detail and the cost the state will incur from longer mandatory incarcerations, but I expect the main thrust of the bill to pass and be signed into law.

The word this morning is that Pelosi may be struggling to control the liberal side of the House Democratic caucus on the Iraq supplemental. The Politico says that 50-75 Democrats may vote against the spending bill because it doesn't go against the war hard enough. The dichotomy comes in with Democrats from more conservative districts, who were happy with placing restrictions on Bush's ability to make war but allowing him to waive those restrictions if he publicly justified them.

This sort of thing seems wrong on both sides. I think there's got to be another way to have oversight on Bush's war activities without providing him an out to do whatever he wants. Congress is supposed to oversee the Executive. That is one of their jobs. Sure, it has been politically difficult to engage in oversight in the years since 9/11, but that environment has changed now, and for the better. The American people want Congress to oversee the activities of the Bush administration -- that's why they were voted in. However, on the other hand, the more liberal members who abhor this legislation should be working to prove that point while keeping it quiet. I know it isn't always possible, but there's something to be said for hashing it out before it gets to the point of public awareness that giant swaths of your party caucus are mad at each other.

US Senator Jim Webb took a different tactic than House Democrats have been exploring by jumping straight to Iran. He introduced legislation that specifically requires President Bush to get Congressional approval before he takes any military action against Iran. Well, to be more specific, it prohibits funding for any actions against Iran not approved by Congress. It is proposed as an amendment to Bush's supplemental Iraq spending bill, which is the right way to do it.

However, what I know about the American government, the military, and the intelligence community tells me that this sort of thing usually doesn't get proposed unless there's some indicator that an attack has an immediate plausibility. We see media reports every week or so, from Seymour Hersh on down, implying all sorts of scary things about the Bush administration's plans for Iran. So is this a deterrent or a response?

Finally, is anyone paying attention to what's going on in Russia? A friend of mine wrote me an email about it last night, and said he'd seen it described elsewhere as "Putin's transformation from 'cool foreign guy' to 'full-on Bond Villian.'" No matter how you describe it, another Russian journalist who seemingly ran afoul of the new KGB by criticizing the government is dead, this time by falling out a window in an incident suspected of foul play. Last week, a US citizen who happened to be a Russian intelligence expert, and who further happened to be friends with Litvinenko, the spy who was killed by polonium-210, just happened to be seriously injured last week in Washington DC by falling onto several bullets outside his home. Someone should point out to these guys that the Cold War is over.